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Sherman Frederick
Tax eaters host a dinner
Updated: Mar. 7, 2010 | 12:59 p.m.
Consider the benign-sounding Nevada Vision Stakeholder Group and be afraid. Very afraid.
The tax eaters who run the Legislature plan to use it to lure you over for dinner and then cook and eat your wallet, your children's wallet and your children's children's wallet.
It sprang to life last year when the Legislature took $500,000 of your money (what budget crisis, right?) and created the stakeholder group, tasking it to discover a strategic "vision" for Nevada's quality-of-life goals.
Sounds like a "woo-hoo!" Yes? Anything but.
It's a ploy by the tax-and-spend crowd to quantify just how crummy Nevada is as a state so that legislators with a public employee union election base can use it to as a fulcrum to raise taxes and waste more of your money.
You think I'm overstating the case? Then take a look at who legislators selected as members of the stakeholder panel. One group, representing about 5 percent of Nevadans miraculously found a way to get appointed to 47 percent of the voting positions. Can you guess what group that was?
Right you are, sir! Ding, ding, ding!
Nine of the 19 "stakeholders" are either government employees, retired government employees or public employee union executives.
Don't get the wrong idea.
I like all of the people I know who are on the commission. Drank with a few. Received good tips from a few. Perfectly fine people, as people go. Well-meaning. Diligent. Etcetera. Etcetera. Etcetera. So don't even try to resort to an argument that I somehow hate the people on this panel or want government downsized to the point of anarchy, its workers dismembered in the town square. I don't.
But I also don't need a fortune-teller to know the future of this creature.
It is designed to articulate how backward Nevada is as a state. And believe me, judging from the first few reams of paper generated by the group, Nevada is Stone Age backward.
How cruel we are to our underprivileged. How shabbily we educate our children. Perfectly good printers have already died publishing the statistics for how much our quality of life would improve if only Nevadans were not so greedy and stupid.
In the end, there will be a report. Testimony will be heard. And after every last dog and pony dies of exhaustion, the show will provide political cover for the mindless mother of all tax increases in the 2011 Legislature.
As you may have gathered by now, the whole idea gives me heartburn. I think it should give most Nevadans heartburn.
First, it's pure government Kabuki, staged to produce a specific ending. Save the $500,000 and assign a staffer from the state employees union to write the report now.
Second, the nonvoting chair of the Nevada Vision Stakeholder Group is a Virginia professor who -- and I kid you not -- has lived in Nevada since January.
Not January 1988.
Not January 2009.
January ... as in a few weeks ago.
Have we no pride? We've commissioned a half-a-million-dollar quality-of-life vision study guided by a guy who hasn't lived in the state long enough to hook up his cable? This, my friends, is your Legislature at work.
Finally, and most importantly, the whole "stakeholder" pretense is based on the spectacularly false premise that government plays an important role in a citizen's quality of life. Beyond public safety and basic infrastructure, quality of life in Nevada stems not from government, but from faith, family and freedom.
That's Nevada's heritage. That's what's worth studying.
Do you think this contrived legislative study will, even for a page, leave room for the idea of sustainable, smaller government designed to protect and incubate the private sector as the true long-term driver of life quality?
It won't. It should, because there are still Nevadans out there who hold on to the notion that government services should be evaluated based on necessity, efficiency and efficacy, not on the wages and benefits of those who provide the services.
Imagine a state with substantially lower taxes, higher opportunity and more freedom. That's a vision worth striving for, isn't it?
I wonder how many Nevadans are with me on this. Let's take a count in November.
Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@ reviewjournal.com) is publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media.
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Reagarding printing the tax rolls...if "credibility" knew anything about the laws they would have known that most public announcements are published in a publication with general distribution that all citizens have access to. This has to be bid on by the publications. Also most of these rates are well below the normal retail or national rates charged. Newspapers in particular are accessable to most anyone who will subscribe or pick one up at a newsstand. On line postings are only available to those with computers or access to ones at the public library if they know how to operate a computer. A large percentage of senior citizens don't have that ability or care to. By the way. I am 76 and have not chosen to be left behind in the cyber space age and I am a former newspaper publisher in communities much smaller than Las Vegas.
Suggestion: be careful how you comment about things in which you have no expertise.
The problem, as I see it, is that we have a governing body of politicians that can't seem to say no to spending. Even when one branch (State) is faced with billions in deficits, the city is going ahead with building a new city hall. In private practice, when a casino sees they can't commit the funds, they stop their new project and pull the cranes. Home builders stop building new developments, people cut back on frivolous expenditures.
In other words, they stop spending, and committing funds to future projects. But not our elected leaders!
And the 800 pound gorilla in the room, that NOBODY talks about, and could save this western state 100s of billion$, is..... can anybody guess what I'm gonna bring up????
Illegal immigration; and the drain on our hospitals, schools, jobs, welfare payments and crime.
How about this high power commission, with it's newbee chairman, producing a report that would detail how much money illegal immigration is costing this state?
That would be worth the $500,000.
The commission will miss the best answer because they are stuck digging the same old holes that they have always dug. Just like Barbara Buckley, they are trapped by their own illusions of what makes a stable tax base. Not only do they spend us into the poor house, they stifle business and creativity, cost people jobs and choke the economy of this state.
For these people to come up with a clearly workable answer is to suppose that someday a monkey at a typewriter would pen Romeo and Juliet. I have a better chance of hitting Megabucks.
People are going to scream at the next legislative session, but clearly we cannot do business as usual.
Sherm:
Do you know what a lie is? I would think that a man who asserts that:
"The tax eaters who run the Legislature plan to use it to lure you over for dinner and then cook and eat your wallet, your children's wallet and your children's children's wallet" SHOULD know, since what you wrote here fits all the elements of a lie to wit, An intentional misstatement of a material fact with knowledge or reckless disregard as to the truth.
See, whatever you "think" that "Credibility" said not only wasn't a misstatement (it was true in all parts that the rj "lobbied" the governor, and that the governor veto the legislation, and that the rj got its taxpayer dollars.
HOWEVER, what YOU said, meets ALL the elements of a lie.
See, you KNOW, that the legislature didn't "eat" anything, much less a wallet, and you also KNOW, that THIS was a material fact, and you KNOW, therefore that what YOU said was a lie.
Hard to understand that a man who lies each and every day, doesn't recognize one when he sees it; but then again, you just "recently" changed parties.
By the way, THIS is just MY "theory".
LOL
Credibility: You're wrong in suggesting that the long-standing law that requires public disclosure of property taxes in any way equates to what the Legislature did with the "stakeholder" legislation. The property tax law pre-dates me and the attempt to kill the law was opposed by all newspaper publishers in Nevada. It is a lie to say the governor vetoed the bill to "give" $500,000 to the Review-Journal.
If Nevada's per pupil spending had risen only as fast as inflation we would have saved the state and local taxpayers $2.1 billion in the year 2007 alone...
http://www.nevadabusiness.com/issue/0310/38/2204
If per pupil spending had risen as fast as inflation from 1998 through 2009 we would have saved $1.5 billion over that period. The savings rise to over $2 billion, if per pupil spending had of remained attached to inflation from 1998 through FY 2011..
We need to reign in government spending.
When the RJ brought this panel to light a few months ago, I groaned.
It immediately felt like Rory Reids "Blue Ribbon Business" panel, and Obama's 36 czars, and oddly enough, a little UMC/Lacy Thomas thrown into the mix.
I'm just dying to hear what unpredictable suggestions this unbiased and fiscally responsible panel comes up with for solutions.
Can we sue or prosecute the legislators or panel members for misuse of public funds? Since this is just another example of redistribution of wealth, in time for the elections in 2012.